The people are the essence of an organization. Processes, work, achievements, and happiness stem from the collaboration between individuals. However, people need a set of tools to be productive in their environment. You can’t create miracles with your bare hands.

Apart from our human potential, at Camplight we’ve been developing the set of tools that help us the most to be more effective and efficient. In this article, I’m going to present to you CamplightOS — the set of technologies that help us evolve organically.

In the course of 7 years, we’ve found that the most important tools for us are the tools that help us work on our initiatives and the tools that help us manage our money. We keep track of and work on our initiatives mainly via Trello, Slack and Google Meet. These are the tools that provide us with ways to organize, have quick discussions and schedule online meetings whenever we need to do it.

Our money management is done exclusively with in-house systems that we’ve developed over the course of Camplight’s evolution. Until now we’ve found out that we need two such tools — MoneyFlow and SharedExpenses. With the first, we keep track of our profits and outcomes and with the second we share expenses for tools and services which all of us use.

This post has the intention to go a bit in-depth about how we use each tool.

Trello

We use Trello to keep track of all initiatives and projects. Boards are organized differently depending on their purpose.

Our main board is “Camplight - Organizational”. It is a hub for every effort to improve Camplight and to synchronize about important events. It’s exclusively organized around initiatives — each board member can create an initiative whenever they feel like it and have an open space to gather a team around it or just to ask for a bit of advice. Some initiatives grow so much that they need their own board. Which leads us to the next most important board in the cooperative.

Camplight is nothing without the people in it. That’s why we have a “Collaboration with people” board. In it, we keep track of all the people who’d like to join the cooperative, who are in the process of joining it or who just prefer to work with us as partners. Each person who’d like to join Camplight has someone responsible for their onboarding. The “onboarder” should guide the person to Camplight’s inner workings and provide timely feedback both to the newcomer and to people who are closer to the fire.

Currently, Camplight is mainly an outsourcing company. This is one of our biggest initiatives which has kept us fed, happy and warm for seven years. We have a dedicated “Camplight — Outsourcing” board for it where each request for a project comes. It’s a bit like an open marketplace where each of us can choose the project they would like to work on. A big portion of the incoming projects gets transferred to our trusted network of partners because we’re usually fully booked.

Each development project which has been started by Camplighters has its own board. Usually, the board has 6 columns — info, backlog, planning, next, in progress and for review. We’ve found out that usually this setup is enough for beginning a Lean/Agile project but most of the boards evolve with time. Currently, the biggest outsourcing project in Camplight spans around 7 boards and is like a mini-organization within the organization.

Slack

The most important thing about using Slack at Camplight is that nothing important should happen in it. Everything should eventually go to a Trello card. This way we make sure each communication has its context and people who are responsible for it. So, we try the best we can to offload discussions from Slack to Trello.

Of course, this sets us up for a natural question — Why do we need Slack at all? Well, Slack is really good to spark a discussion which everyone would see. Also, when someone begins a certain communication it’s usually not suited for a full-blown Trello card. It needs some incubation time until it grows to have context and a team attached to it. That’s rare, though. Most of our important discussions start directly in Trello and we just announce them in Slack.

The last thing Slack’s really good at is to have a place where you can share yourself with others. We have our #random and #music channels where everybody shares random stuff and music they’re interested in. I think these are the most used channels in the coop. Also, we have the #help channel where everyone can ask for help whenever they need it. Some quite hairy problems have found their resolution in that channel.

Google Meet

Although we try to avoid it, sometimes we can’t escape live meetings which aren’t connected with parties and games. Usually, this happens when a Trello discussion gets a bit involved and one can’t summarize it properly or it has just taken too long. The other good use of Google Meet is to make weekly meetings in bigger teams or just to pair code when there’s the need to.

MoneyFlow

This is one of our first projects for internal use. In the beginning, we used huge spreadsheets to track the incomes and outcomes for the organization. Of course, managing such spreadsheets is quite a tedious job and that’s why we’ve developed a tool for it.

Actually, MoneyFlow was built for about 2 weeks using node-organic. Since then it has worked quite well with some minor additions around better money-movement reports and notifications. It’s a tool you need to get used to but it does the job.

Nevertheless, a more polished version is on the horizon which we plan to release as a product. It’ll be an accounting product for evolutionary organizations.

SharedExpenses

The other thing which is quite specific for Camplight is that we have shared expenses. Because we don’t have capital or budget — each member receives everything they make — when we have to pay for our services and tools we do a shared expense. Again, this was a huge spreadsheet that was prone to errors and manual labor. Around two years ago we reworked the spreadsheets into a service which despite its hideous UI does a good job at keeping us mindful about the coop’s expenses.

Bonus — Assista

There’s one last tool I didn’t include in the intro section. During our outsourcing work, we found out that clients really love when you give them a detailed report about the time you’ve invested in different tasks. That’s why we developed Assista — a bot for effortless time tracking. It’s currently integrated with Trello because that was our main use case at the time. Our Trello flow involves moving cards to the “in progress” column whenever you are working on a given task. Assista just tracks that movement and calculates the time invested by you, so you don’t have to toggl stuff or remember and fill in spreadsheets.

Actually, it’s more than that. We’d like Assista to evolve as a bot which helps you work better and smarter. In the future, it may provide you with hints about when you’re productive the most, whether someone on the project is near burnout or just help you automate some grunt work.

Basically, that’s our toolset. It has evolved over the years and is still under development. We make sure to reevaluate our instruments every now and then, so we can be on top of our productivity.

There’s an idea to do a full Camplight OS product. Maybe having these tools packaged in a single app will make it quite easy to organize a decentralized company like Camplight. What are your thoughts about it?